Shakespeare's
Sexuality

As with
many aspects of Shakespeare's life, there is little direct evidence with
regards to Shakespeare's sexuality aside from the fact that he was married
to Anne Hathaway and fathered three children. Circumstantial evidence
suggests Shakespeare's wedding to Hathaway was hurried because she was
already pregnant. Evidence for this is that their first child, Susanna,
was born six months after the marriage ceremony on May 26, 1583. In
addition, a marriage license was issued for the couple after only one
reading of their intent to marry (the reading was normally done three
times in order to give local residents a chance to voice any legal or
other objection to the marriage).

It is
possible that Shakespeare felt trapped by this marriage, speculation
supported by the fact that he left his family and moved to London after
only three years of marriage.

While
in London, Shakespeare may have had affairs with different women. One
anecdote along these lines is provided by a law student named John
Manningham, who wrote in his diary that Shakespeare had a brief affair
with a woman during a performance of Richard III. While this is one of the
few surviving contemporary accounts about Shakespeare, scholars are not
convinced it is true (although the story may have helped inspire the 1998
film Shakespeare in Love). Possible evidence of other affairs are that
twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married
woman (the so-called "Dark Lady").

In
recent decades some scholars have taken another view of Shakespeare's
sexuality, stating that possible homoerotic allusions in a number of his
works suggest that Shakespeare was bisexual. While twenty-six of
Shakespeare's Sonnets are addressed to his Dark Lady, one hundred and
twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair
Lord"). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focuses on the
young man's beauty and the writer's devotion, has been interpreted as
suggestive evidence for Shakespeare's being bisexual. For example, in
1954, C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for
ordinary male friendship" (although he added that they are not the
poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no
real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century
literature." Nonetheless, others interpret them as referring to
intense friendship rather than sexual love.